The Action habit.

Up to that point, I had more or less been assuming that I would naturally just slide into the career situation that was perfectly suited to me. (It may sound weird that a grown man would think like that, but I did.)

Surprise, surprise, that hadn’t happened.

A friend who did corporate training for a living (and has since morphed into a life coach) told me, “Dude, cream rises to the top. But it’s got to be in milk first. If you’re not excelling, are you in the right environment for you to excel?”

Twice in the last three months, I’ve missed out on paying work, losing in the end because I was too expensive.

Too what?

The client had a pay scale, or a spreadsheet somewhere that dictated how much they were prepared to pay for my time.

On or below that line, and I was in. One penny above, and I was out. Simple. Case closed.

The bottom line was the expense they would incur by hiring me.

I had been reduced to a cost.

They (and I) had failed to consider: How much profit or benefit would they make by hiring me? (It’s a skill I haven’t yet mastered, obviously.)

You will often hear someone moaning about the shortage of engineers, the lack of technical skills, young people don’t want to go into engineering anymore, it’s holding back the company’s growth, it’s holding back national growth, etc, etc.

In 1993, I was not long married, getting very little sleep (due to the new baby howling in the middle of the night), and less than a year into my second permanent job (with 7 months of unemployment in between them).

On New Year’s day, I vividly remember sitting in the hospital holding my one-day-old daughter, thinking, “Darn. If I’m going to attempt a career change, I’d better do it fast.”

I was already losing interest in my new job, and I suspected that my employer might also be losing interest in me. (They were.)

I’d been fascinated with flying machines ever since the age of three, when my grandparents had taken me to watch them at the nearby municipal airport. I’d been transfixed then, as I still am whenever anything flies overhead.

Freelancer is a site that does just what it says on the tin: Connects people and businesses who need specific work done, with the people who can do that work, wherever in the world they are.

Nothing new. Guru, eLance and oDesk have been doing it for the last decade.

What came as a surprise to me was the kind or work being offered on Freelancer. The eLances and oDesks of the world have until now mainly been useful for copywriting, SEO, web dev, software coding, graphic design, etc. Never the “harder” technical stuff, and certainly not the engineering disciplines within aerospace. That has typically been packaged up and “thrown over the wall” to lower-cost firms, often in cheaper countries.

Two different Flight Global articles posted in February alone argue that the scene is set ripe for a wave of aerospace mergers and acquisitions.

Apparently there was only (only!) US$9 billion in M&A activity in 2012.

The reason? The big players have been chomping at the bit to merge for a while. They’e been stymied so far by the politicians. However, those same politicians, mainly in the US, now desperately need to cut back their defence spending. Hence the shackles will probably be removed.

What does this mean for the lowly aerospace knowledge worker with aspirations to satisfy and bills to pay?

It’s a necessary, if unfortunate, feature of the aerospace industry, that it is highly regulated. Of course. The flying public has this irrational desire to want to arrive at their destination in one piece. With their baggage. Therefore, the process of designing, making, and operating aircraft must be regulated tightly.

Which means, those working in it live in a very conservative little bubble. You tend not to have much clue of what life is like in other bubbles.

And you tend to attract people who are conservative and blinkered in outlook.

I’m still meeting people in aerospace who say, “Yeah, I’ve heard about this LinkedIn thing. What is it?”

In a fast-changing world, that approach to life is fine, as long as your nice little bubble stays intact.

On the odd chance that you’re wondering why someone would want to create a site like this, I thought I would tell you a bit of my own story.

I am a British engineer, living and working near Bristol, England.

However, if you bump into me in the street and have the misfortune to strike up a conversation, you’ll quickly detect something amiss in my accent. That’s because I’m also Canadian, and have spent most of my life in the Canadian provinces of Québec and Ontario. I actually grew up speaking both English and French, depending on who I was playing with. I was very proud of being able to speak two languages, and it’s a source of shame to me that my French has deteriorated over the years. Although that’s probably unavoidable, given that I have generally found myself surrounded by uniligual anglophones.

One of my earliest memories was of a visit from my grandparents. They would drive down from just outside Montréal to my home in Québec City. To give my parents some time off, they would take us kids to the local airport. It wasn’t a busy place at all, but Air Canada did fly some Vickers Viscounts and Vanguards through there. I would be absolutely transfixed by these amazing machines. The noise made by the props seemed musical.And all the movements on the ground, passengers getting on and off, taxiing to and from the runway, the take-off . . . . . wow.